Can I get a witness? Viewing mayfield brooks at JACK

Performance artist mayfield brooks
(photo: Amar Puri)

Letters to Marsha with Viewing Hours (a diptych)
by mayfield brooks
JACK
January 30-February 1

In the tiny storage room, where the pungent aroma of earth and rose petals prickles your nostrils, I stand in a single line of people skirting the edge of a funereal bier covered in colorful decaying foliage. I see a bare foot sticking out from this cover, even as I hear mayfield brooks' voice on a looping recording (calling for "a witness") and tamp down a feeling of being trapped. I notice a thin, dry stalk, its end lightly poking the sole of brooks' foot, and I wonder if brooks feels it, is irritated by it. I wonder if I shouldn't pluck it away. But I dutifully stand, like everybody else, listening, looking in this solemn enclosure. Finally, I carefully--so as to not startle brooks or draw anyone else's attention--reach for the stalk and pull it off brooks' flesh.

In small groups, the audience will cycle through that opening viewing room then gradually assemble in a larger but still intimate space nicely set up to encourage comfort and seating choice. This feels more like a funeral parlor than a performance space. Merging two of brooks' works, Letters to Marsha with Viewing Hours (a diptych) is every bit as much a memorial service, a participatory ritual, a raucous channeling and a party with festive cakes (by Susannah Simpson) as it is a performance.

Attend and you will have ample time to gaze or move around the space and commune with the dead (brooks' and yours). Inspired primarily by the late Black gay activist and Stonewall veteran Marsha P. Johnson, this evening introduces us to brooks' ongoing practice of writing heartfelt letters to this role model and would-be mentor and gently suggests we take up a similar practice with our own ancestors of blood or mind.

Will you also see strong, compelling performance in this space? Oh, yes. brooks' collaborating team--a water bearer, a tea maker, a florist, a guide and various viewing hours caretakers--establishes and eases us into the fluidity of the space, but brooks rules the space and gives a master class in commitment, responsiveness, fervent aliveness.

The evening, nearly two hours of sensory richness, is well worth the sometimes frustrating task of navigating subway travel to, from and around Brooklyn. (As of last night, the "C" in C train stands for "cusswords.") Maybe just give yourself at least 15 minutes more than you think you might need to get there, then don't fret because the opening of the piece is experienced in shifts. Relax with some tea in the lobby.

Technical Director/Creative Consultant: Niko Tsocanos

Curated by Stacy Grossfield as part of her IMAGES // LANDSCAPES series and JACK's Reparations365 series.

Letters to Marsha with Viewing Hours (a diptych) continues with 8pm performances tonight and tomorrow. For information and ticketing, click here.

JACK
18 Putnam Avenue, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn
C to Clinton-Washington or Shuttle to Franklin Avenue

******

DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Ballroom with a difference: Freedman's "Hot to Trot"

Ernesto Palma and Nikolai Shpakov,
ballroom competition dancers,
appear in Gail Freedman's Hot to Trot.
(photo: Curt Worden)

Emily Coles and Kieren Jameson
(photo: Robert Cortlandt)

The international ballroom dance competition scene was largely unfamiliar to me when I sat down to watch Gail Freedman's documentary Hot to Trot. If you asked what I thought of same-sex competitive ballroom dancing, I would have cheered because hooray, I'm a lesbian! There was no way to anticipate that, by the end of nearly 90 minutes, I'd find tears pooling in my eyes and realize I cared deeply about the people Freedman had so gently, carefully introduced to me. A lesson in a niche of a niche of the dance world offers a space to think about what it means to be human.

The film follows the twists, turns, dips and changing partnerships in the lives of same-sex ballroom dancers--like the charismatic, creatively ambitious Ernesto Palma, raised in poverty in Costa Rica, a former meth addict for whom dancing is emotional self-care; the Russian Nikolais Shpakov who blossoms as a performer as he grows more confident in his gay identity; and Emily Coles, battling diabetes as she strives to create beauty. "It's Fred and Fred and Ginger and Ginger," quips a judge at California's annual April Follies competition. But it's more than that: It's people you might know. The personal is political, as we used to say, and the intimacy--enhanced by Freedman's team of cinematographers and her editor--makes for compelling viewing.

Cinematography: Joel Shapiro, Diana Wilmar, John Cummings, Vanessa Carr
Editing: Dina Potocki

Opens Friday, August 24 at Quad Cinema (New York) and Friday, September 14 at Laemmle Music Hall Theater (Los Angeles)

Quad Cinema
34 West 13th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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"THEM" returns to its East Village birthplace

Johnnie Mercer Cruise and Hentyle Yapp
dance in THEM at Performance Space New York.
(photo: Rachel Papo)

Michael Watkiss and Alvaro Gonzalez Dupuy
(photo: Rachel Papo)

THEM

Conceived, directed, and performed by:

Chris Cochrane (music/sound)
Dennis Cooper (text/spoken word performance)
Ishmael Houston-Jones (movement)

at Performance Space New York (East Village Series)

*****

Tilt in the direction of a memory, starting anywhere. With sound: a deepening drone. With light: splashed across a man's back and legs otherwise engulfed by semidarkness. With bodies: still, lining the margins, covered in shadows.

THEM (made at and for Performance Space 122, premiered in 1986, now revived for Performance Space New York) is a way of remembering the AIDS epidemic and the lives downtown artists led and lost. With Chris Cochrane's electric guitar--caustic shredding, blurting, pounding dissonance. With Dennis Cooper's text--direct and revealing, vulnerable, delivered from off to one side, with isolating distance and longing observation. With dancers, led and gathered by Ishmael Houston-Jones, who toss themselves across the space and at each other with fiery abandon, who occupy the expanse, crafting a world necessary for themselves and their kind. With rites of gesture and behavior. With exploration through touch. With play. With aggression. With a visceral sense of the overpowering, inescapable presence of death...and Death.

The theater at Performance Space New York has just the right degree of plain-and-grim to help this memory work. Houston-Jones's score has been improvised by each of his dancers; the current revival's vigorous cohort includes Alvaro Gonzalez Dupuy, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Michael Parmelee, Jeremy Pheiffer, Kensaku Shinohara, Michael Watkiss, and Hentyle Yapp. (Mercer and Yapp are especially headstrong, cogent performers, alone or together.) A spare, functional design--here a simple white mattress; there a menacing plank of wood--makes human movements and energies pop in the space, setting the stage for the emergence of a nightmare buried deep in the work and the blaring sirens (invoking, at once, a speeding ambulance and a city under threat) with which Cochrane drags the work to its end.

THEM continues tonight (7:30pm) and Thursday (7pm) with a post-show talk with Visual AIDS on Thursday. For information and tickets, click here.

Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue, 4th Floor (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan

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J.D. McClatchy, 72

J.D. McClatchy, Poet of the Body, in Sickness and Health, Dies at 72
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, April 11, 2018

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Sammy Williams, 69

Sammy Williams, Tony Winner in ‘A Chorus Line,’ Dies at 69
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, March 22, 2018

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David Ogden Stiers, 75

David Ogden Stiers, Major Winchester on ‘M*A*S*H,’ Dies at 75
by Anita Gates, The New York Times, March 4, 2018

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Bob Smith, 59

Bob Smith, Groundbreaking Gay Comedian, Is Dead at 59
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, January 25, 2018

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Jim Nabors, 87

Jim Nabors, 87, TV’s Gomer Pyle, Is Dead
by Richard Severo, The New York Times, November 30, 2017

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Debra Chasnoff, 60

Debra Chasnoff, Whose Films Redefined Gay Families, Dies at 60
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, November 14, 2017

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Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.: Receiving our spiritual nourishment

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.

is a choreographer who researches, illustrates and creates

 from an African-American male perspective. 

In his work, he tackles issues resulting from 

a capitalistic imperialist patriarchal white supremacist system.

(photo by Ricarrdo Valentine)

***

Love & Forgiveness: I am really interested in the social function of love and forgiveness. I question a society that calls itself a “Christian nation” yet remains at odds with the practice of that very philosophy. I’ve found that love and forgiveness in this society is derived out of a white heterosexual patriarchal religious structure. In order to receive these vibrations (because we are humans and understand frequencies i.e. feelings, hence the use), according to the dominant socio-religion you have to assimilate to the specific ways in which love and forgiveness is imparted to you. For me the concept of love and forgiveness is found in the humanity of my mother’s and grandmother’s hands. Where do we receive our spiritual nourishment?

Collard greens and Corn bread go together like love and forgiveness an ancient healing practice. Most of us forget the ways in which we’ve fucked up. Our mothers and grandmothers, and this a general statement, are always there fueling us since birth. It’s up to us as growing citizens of our communities to look at these finite yet very embodied experiences of love and forgiveness as tools of resistance. I ingested the magic of my mother and grandmother, becoming realized, knowing that in order for me to pass through this plane of existence I’d need to learn how to love myself and forgive myself and reciprocate that with others. How do we become active in love and forgiveness? Let’s cook more, sharing the warmth of our souls with hungry hearts and stomachs.  

-- Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.

how to survive a plague

by Brother(hood) Dance! 

(Ricarrdo Valentine and Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.)

Danspace Project at St.Marks Church

Platform 2016: Lost & Found

Co-curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Will Rawls

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Kevin Meaney, 60

Kevin Meaney, Veteran Stand-Up Comedian and Actor, Dies at 60
by Eli Rosenberg, The New York Times, October 22, 2016

Brian Asawa, 49

Brian Asawa, Celebrated Countertenor and Pathbreaker at the Met, Dies at 49
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, April 23, 2016

Oliver Sacks, 82

Oliver Sacks Dies at 82; Neurologist and Author Explored the Brain’s Quirks
by Gregory Cowles, The New York Times, August 30, 2015

Oliver Sacks, Casting Light on the Interconnectedness of Life
by Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, August 30, 2015

Your witness wanted: Attend Fire & Ink this fall.

Author Randall Kenan
will be the keynote speaker
at Fire & Ink, IV in Detroit.

Fire & Ink IV: Witness

October 8-11, Detroit, MI

REGISTER NOW!

"Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have."

—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Keynote speaker Randall Kenan is the author of a novel, A Visitation of Spirits; two works of non-fiction, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century and The Fire This Time; and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. He edited and wrote the introduction for The Cross of Redemption: The Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the North Carolina Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rome Prize. He is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Fire & Ink IV: Witness is a writers festival that will address the urgent question of what it means to bear witness as LGBTQ and SGL writers of African descent and heritage in the 21st century. Merriam-Webster offers these definitions of "witness": One that gives evidence. One who is present at an event and can say that it happened. One who testifies in a cause. An attestation of fact. One who has personal knowledge of something. Public affirmation by word or example of usually religious faith or conviction. We invite Black LGBTQ and SGL writers and artists to assay their own definitions of witness.

Fire & Ink is a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing the understanding, visibility and awareness of the works of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender writers of African descent and heritage.

Dream project for George Takei will come to Broadway

George Takei to Star in Broadway Musical About Interned Japanese-Americans
by Patrick Healy, The New York Times, February 5, 2015

Miguel Gutierrez talks about "West Side Story"

Following that headline, I think I need add nothing more than Location, Date and Time...but here's everything else anyway!

Queer/Art/Film presents

MIGUEL GUTIERREZ 

presents WEST SIDE STORY

at

IFC Center

Monday, September 8, 8:15pm

WEST SIDE STORY
1961. US. 152 min.
directed by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise

It took four of New York’s leading gay theater artists – Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents – to brilliantly update one of the most beloved straight love stories in history, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. For our guest presenter, acclaimed choreographer Miguel Gutierrez (whose most recent show premiered at the 2014 Whitney Biennial) the Academy Award-winning film adaptation was his favorite film growing up, even though its “weird mix of codes” set him up for a “lifetime of confusion about being a queer, Latino dancer." If you’ve only seen it on TV, don’t miss the chance to see it on the big screen. Tonight, tonight...

Screening followed by drinks and discussion at Julius Bar (map/directions).

Get more information and screening tickets here.

IFC Center 
323 6th Avenue (at West 3rd Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Dancers Miguel Gutierrez (left)
and Mickey Mahar in costume for
Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/
(photo by Eric McNatt)

Miguel Gutierrez, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow in choreography, lives in Brooklyn and makes performances. His most recent show - Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/ -premiered in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. His work is presented frequently in NYC, across the country and internationally at venues and festivals such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Dance Theater Workshop, On the Boards In Seattle, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, PICA in Portland, Pompidou Centre in Paris, ImPuls Tanz in Vienna and many others. His video and performance work has appeared in the NYC MIX Festival. He has received support from Foundation for Contemporary Art, United States Artists, Lambent Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, MAP Fund, National Dance Project, National Performance Network, Jerome Foundation and Creative Capital. He has choreographed music videos for Diane Cluck, Holcombe Waller and Le Tigre, has released an EP as The Belleville, has performed several times at Joe’s Pub and has sung with Antony and the Johnsons and My Robot Friend. He teaches at Hollins University and Movement Research. His book WHEN YOU RISE UP is available from 53rd State Press and he maintains a blog at Stargayze.com about his emotional spinouts due to celebrity sightings. He invented DEEP AEROBICS, most recently used to warm up audiences for The Knife’s tour, and is training to become a Feldenkrais Method practitioner. 

Frank M. Robinson, 87

Frank M. Robinson, Dies at 87; Author and Adviser to Harvey Milk
by Paul Vitello, The New York Times, July 4, 2014

Lucy Sexton on what makes a family

I Married the Gay Father of My Child
an interview with performance artist and Bessie Awards producer Lucy Sexton
by Anna Sale, Death, Sex & Money, WNYC, June 4, 2014

Ned O'Gorman, 84

Ned O’Gorman, 84, Dies; Poet Founded Innovative Harlem School
by Douglas Martin, The New York Times, March 7, 2014

26th Annual Lambda Literary Award Finalists Announced

26th Annual Lambda Literary Award Finalists Announced
Lambda Literary, March 6, 2014

2014 marks the debut of the Graphic Novel category. The awards ceremony will be held on Monday, June 2, at The Great Hall at Cooper Union, New York City.

For complete information and tickets, click here.